Federated master data governance is a deployment option for SAP Master Data Governance that is offered in addition to centrally managed master data governance. It allows the distribution of data ownership to several MDG instances, each owning a subset of the master data. This includes the option to activate SAP Master Data Governance on operative SAP S/4HANA systems to use them as application data owners (ADO).
SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition is the foundation for the federated governance approach.
Federated governance is an alternative to managing master data completely centrally in an organization's system landscape. A federated approach balances central and de-central master data processes based on a clear data ownership model to make sure that data is created and changed exactly where it is best understood. Accordingly, in federated governance you have a core data owner (system) that is responsible for the enterprise-wide relevant master data attributes (core data), and you have de-central application data owners (systems) each of which is responsible for individual application-specific segments of the master data (application data).
Using the Business Partner as an example, one MDG instance is responsible for core data (for example, name, address, tax numbers, identification numbers), and several other MDG instances can have ownership of application-specific data (for example, master data that controls sales and financials processes). Customers can define the ownership according to their specific landscape. In federated master data governance, in addition to a coordinated distribution of data in the landscape, processes are also conducted in a coordinated fashion and can be tracked across system boundaries. Data can be maintained in all MDG instances and master data clients. This data needs to be replicated to a core data owner (for example, MDG on SAP S/4HANA) that evaluates which data has been maintained, and that determines the relevant data owners. These data owners are informed about the changes, upon which they revise and verify their data and send the results back to the core data owner. Once the core data owner has received a response from all data owners, it replicates the data to all connected MDG instances and master data clients in the landscape.
Note
Please note that parts of the figure are still future road map topics. First of all, it is about the business partner domain as of today. More domains are planned to follow as specified in the SAP Road map Explorer.The key consideration when deploying SAP Master Data Governance is whether you want one single global MDG system – we call this Centrally Managed MDG, or whether you want a federated network of several MDG systems. These are the two different columns of this two-by-two-matrix in the above figure.
Within Centrally Managed MDG, the question is whether you want a public cloud software-as-a-service solution for the core data attributes. This would be SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition in the lower left box. Or whether you want to govern core attributes and SAP S/4HANA attributes, then you would go with SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA.
For federation, you need to decide who should be the one global owner of the core data. Data ownership is one of the key concepts of federation. At one central point, you define for the complete organization, which part of the master data is owned by which system. There is always one single system that is the core data owner. This system, for example, decides whether any business partner is a global duplicate. And this core data owner also orchestrates the federated process across all MDG systems. This core data owner can either be SAP MDG cloud edition – the lower box on the right-hand side, or SAP MDG on SAP S/4HANA – the upper box.
In addition to that one core data owner, you can have multiple application data owners.
Each of these owns different aspects of the master data – perhaps for one region or for one business unit. These application data owners will typically be co-deployed with existing operational SAP S/4HANA systems that you anyways have in your landscape for that region or that business unit.
- In a nutshell
- Federated MDG is an option: even if you started with one system you can later decide that you would like to expand this into a federated landscape.
- All MDG versions are planned to be part of a federated MDG landscape, with either SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA or SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition enabled as core data owner (CDO), and with SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA (public cloud, private cloud, on premise) as owner of application-specific data (ADO). See the SAP Road Map Explorer for planned timelines.
- Today, SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA 2023 (private cloud or on premise) is enabled as core data owner.